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poemm Number Fifteen/2016 Amy Bailey emoir Kimberly Ball Tina Barr Heather Bartlett Emily Rapp Black story M. L. Brown Grace Cho Casie Cook Melissa Crowe Jude Deason Mollie Hawkins Ashley Jones Kateema Lee Colleen J. McElroy Jamie McFaden Michelle McMillan-Holifield Samantha Pious Sharanna Polk Emily Rems Mary Ruefle Jacqueline Saphra Laura Secord Zhanna Slor Alina Stefanescu Julie Stewart Judith Teitleman Yellena Urazbaeva Gail White 2016 $10.00 .. PMSpoemmemoirstory 2016number fifteen Copyright © 2016 by PMS poemmemoirstory PMS poemmemoirstory appears once a year. We accept unpublished, orig- inal submissions of poetry, memoir, and short fiction during our January 1 through March 31 reading period. We accept simultaneous submissions; however, we ask that you please contact us immediately if your piece is published elsewhere so we may free up space for other authors. While PMS is a journal of exclusively women’s writing, the subject field is wide open. We strongly encourage you to familiarize yourself with PMS before submitting. You can find links on our Web site to some examples of what we publish in the pages of PMS 8, PMS 9, and PMS 14. We ask that you limit your submission to either five poems or 15 pages of prose (4,300 words or less). We look forward to reading your work. Please send all submissions to https://poemmemoirstory.submittable.com/submit. There is a $3 fee, which covers costs associated with our online submissions system. For any other correspondence, contact us at poemmemoirstory@gmail. com. PMS poemmemoirstory is a member of the Council of Literary Maga- zines and Presses (CLMP) and the Council of Editors of Learned Journals (CELJ). Indexed by the Humanities International Index and in Feminist Periodicals: A Current Listing of Contents, PMS poemmemoirstory is distributed to the trade by Ingram Periodicals, 1226 Heil Quaker Blvd., La Vergne, TN 37086-7000. patrons College of Arts and Sciences The University of Alabama at Birmingham The Department of English, The University of Alabama at Birmingham Margaret Harrill Robert Morris, M.D. C. Douglas Witherspoon, M.D. friends Sandra Agricola Andrew Glaze Dail W. Mullins Jr. Daniel Anderson Robert P. Glaze Michael R. Payne Rebecca Bach Randa Graves Robert Lynn Penny George W. Bates Ron Guthrie Lee and Pam Person Peter and Miriam Bellis Ward Haarbauer William Pogue Claude and Nancy Ted Haddin Kieran Quinlan & Bennett John Haggerty Mary Kaiser Randy Blythe Richard Hague Jim Reed James Bonner Sang Y. Han Steven M. Rudd F.M. Bradley Jeff Hansen Rusty Rushton Mary Flowers Braswell Tina Harris John Sartain Jim Braziel Jessica Heflin Janet Sharp Karen Brookshaw Patti Callahan Henry Danny Siegel Bert Brouwer Pamela Horn Juanita Sizemore Edwin L. Brown Jennifer Horne Martha Ann Stevenson Donna Burgess William Hutchings Lou Suarez Linda Casebeer Lanier Scott Isom Susan Swagler Alicia K. Clavell Joey Kennedy Jeane Thompson John E. Collins Sue Kim Drucilla Tyler Robert Collins Marilyn Kurata Catherine Danielou Ruth and Edward Maria Vargas Jim L. Davidson Lamonte Adam Vines Michael Davis Beverly Lebouef Daniel Vines Denise Duhamel Ada Long Larry Wharton Charles Faust Susan Luther Elaine Whitaker Grace Finkel John C. Mayer Jacqueline Wood Edward M. Friend III James Mersmann John M. Yozzo Stuart Flynn Will Miles Carol Prejean Zippert staff editor-in-chief Kerry Madden managing editor Melba Major senior editors Halley Cotton, Poem Jamie McFaden, Memoir Cheyenne Taylor, Story assistant editors Christia Givens Jennie Tippett Kathy Shows Jason Walker Laura Simpson Erin Blankenship business managers Pamela M. Parker administrative assistants Christia Givens cover design Michael J. Alfano cover art “The Orchid Electric,” photograph by Kimberly Ball production/printing 47 Journals, LLC contents from the Editor-in-Chief 1 poemmemoirstory Jacqueline Saphra Aubade 7 Tina Barr Still Life 8 Heather Bartlett When I Was a Boy 10 Michelle McMillan-Holifield When Morgan Freeman Reads T.S. Eliot 11 Kateema Lee Legacy 12 Laura Secord Taking One for Angela 13 Ashley Jones Birmingham Fire and Rescue Haiku, 1963 15 De Soto Leaves a Negro 16 How to Make Your Daughters Culturally Aware and Racially Content During Christmastime 18 List of Famous Alabama Slaves 20 Corn Silk Barbie 21 Colleen J. McElroy Lessons in Deportment 22 Learning to Love Bessie Smith 29 Jude Deason Great Aunt Mona 30 Gail White Dame Edith Sitwell 31 Lauren Goodwin Slaughter Euphemism 32 The Bathroom 34 Waiting for Another Call from My Sister in the Middle of the Night 35 Back to Jackson 36 Before The Birth of Venus 37 contents… Samantha Pious Le Violon 38 The Violin 39 Sur la Place Publique 40 Above the Public Place 42 M. L. Brown Running 44 Synonym for Lichen 45 Kate Daniels Reading a Biography of Thomas Jefferson in the Months of My Son’s Recovery 47 Mary Ruefle South on Seven 52 Jean 53 The Failure of Poetry 54 poemmemoirstory Melissa Crowe Caro Nome 57 Mollie Hawkins On Weddings 60 Sharanna Polk Forever Flint 64 Zhanna Slor What’s Five Feet in Front of You 72 Amy Bailey Woman’s Body Found 80 Grace Cho Crust Girl 87 Casie Cook A Temporary Vessel 97 poemmemoirstory Alina Stefanescu Carpool 107 Emily Rems Andy 114 Judith Teitelman Guesthouse for Ganesha 123 contents… Julie Stewart By a Thread 133 Yellena Urazbaeva The Gospel According to the Mother 142 Jamie McFaden An Interview with Emily Rapp Black 163 contributors 169 FROM THE editor-in-chief Dear Reader, I’ve been thinking about the late Alabama writer, Helen Norris Bell, who I interviewed for an essay published in Five Points: A Journal of Art & Literature several years ago. Helen told me, “I hear the voice of the story when I’m writing, and then I try to set the words on fire and then maybe they will burn.” Helen was always writing, but raising a family and teaching took up so much of her attention that it wasn’t until she retired from Huntingdon College that she really focused on her writing. To put it another way, she was born in 1916 and her first book of stories, The Christmas Wife, was published in 1985, at the age of 69. (She died in 2013 at the age of 97.) I spoke with Helen on summer afternoons in 2007 and 2008 in Black Mountain, North Carolina in an assisted living facility after she’d been moved from her home in Montgomery, Alabama at her son’s direction. Helen was a contemporary of Mary Ward Brown (Tongues of Flame and It Wasn’t All Dancing); Kathryn Tucker Windham (Thirteen Alabama Ghosts, Odd-Egg Editor, Alabama: One Big Front Porch, and many oth- ers); and Harper Lee (To Kill a Mockingbird and Go Set a Watch Man.) In fact, I went to visit Helen to interview her about a Harper Lee book I was working on, but Helen was so fascinating and not at all interested in discussing “Nelle Harper.” Instead, we talked about stories and poetry— what makes good stories and how poetry is critical to the language of short stories. Helen said, “A short story has to have the depth of a novel, but the focus of a poem.” Then, in the cacophony of the nursing home, she advised setting the words on fire. And so, dear reader, welcome to PoemMemoirStory 15 where our contributors, like Helen Norris Bell, have set their own poems, memoirs, and stories on fire too. The poetry in this issue is one of our strongest ever—powerful, eclec- tic, and unflinching with verse that burns a hot white light. I am grateful to Melba Major, who personally wrote to Mary Ruefle, who generously offered three poems of such distilled and haunting verse. We have Kate PMS.. 1 Daniels’ “Reading a Biography of Thomas Jefferson in the Months of My Son’s Recovery,” a narrative poem of Jefferson, addiction, and a mother latching onto a vision in order to survive. Our poets, Ashley Jones, Kateema Lee, Colleen J. McElroy, and Laura Secord have all written poems that reflect on race and the ever-present past in a collective fiery ode to what is happening in our nation today. After Helen Norris Bell wrote fifty poems, she began to write prose and said, “I used the techniques of poetry to write my stories. With stories you have to whittle it down. You have once chance to get your point across.” Melissa Crowe’s brief lyric essay “Caro Nome” manages to get the point across, layer after layer, all the wondrous possibilities (or not) of names and the weight and meaning of names. Sharanna “Rain” Polk gives us the geography of Flint, Michigan and the boys who died and the broken mothers and grandmothers left behind in her wrenchingly matter-of-fact essay, “Forever Flint.” Mollie Hawkins hilariously blazes with her loathing of weddings as a sidekick wedding photographer to her father in the Deep South, and we get to experience abundance and the warmth of making of pies in Grace Cho’s “Crust Girl,” in which she chronicles the life of her mother who makes pies to forget life in Korea in order to prove she belongs in America. In our fiction, we’re so grateful to include Yellena Urazbaeva’s wildly imaginative “The Gospel According to Mother,” a tale of Mary and Joseph that transports us to a village near the Black Sea, while Alice Sefanescu’s “Carpool” shines a searing spotlight on the mental brutal- ity and despair of the dreaded carpool lane at school. Judith Teitelman’s “Guesthouse for Ganesha” is excerpted from her novel about an exiled and expert seamstress, Esther, during World War II whose needlework is as pierced and perfect as the needles in her heart.

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